


Necromantically Uncharacteristic

by JeanLuciferGohard



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Canon-Typical Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Multi, here 2 peddle sick pornographies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:08:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23421460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanLuciferGohard/pseuds/JeanLuciferGohard
Summary: Crux is abusing you to anyone who will listen," said a voice from the entryway, with fifteen minutes to go. "He said you made your blade naked to him. He said you offered him sick pornographies."NSFW Locked Tomb drabbles;  individual summaries and content warnings in chapter notes.Ch 1: Harrow/IantheCh 2: Palamades/Camilla/DulcineaCh 3: Palamedes/CamillaCh 4: Naberius/ColumCh 5: Camilla/CoronaCh 6: Palamedes/Camilla & Camilla/Corona/Gideon
Relationships: Camilla Hect/Coronabeth Tridentarius, Camilla Hect/Palamedes Sextus, Dulcinea Septimus/Palamedes Sextus, Harrowhark Nonagesimus/Ianthe Tridentarius, Palamedes Sextus/Dulcinea Septimus/Camilla Hect
Comments: 26
Kudos: 133





	1. Strange Hands

**Author's Note:**

> Harrow/Ianthe;  
> Tags/Warnings: Vaginal fingering, the inherent body horror of getting finger-banged with a skeleton hand, emotionally toxic realtionships

It always seems like it should feel cold, but it never does; the metal is slick and blood-hot, two gold-plated fingers slipping up into her like it’s nothing, and the bone just feels like bone, which is to say that the bone feels like the inside of Ianthe Tridentarius, the only time her thanergy ever registers, and the inside of Ianthe Tridentarius feels like staying awake all night just to ruin tomorrow, like testing the edge of knife to see how much cutting yourself would hurt. Like the impulse to throw yourself from high places, a gritty, insomniac buzz that flares and crackles like static while she thrusts her finger deeper, grinding her skeletonized palm against Harrow’s clit.

She laughs delightedly.

“Oh, you  _ are _ nasty,” Ianthe croons, laying her head down on Harrow’s trembling stomach, “I knew the Ninth was a filthy little backwater, but I didn’t think you’d be this bad. Did you fuck in your sordid little confessionals, too?” 

She pauses, baby-fine hair skittering restlessly over Harrow’s hip like something alive as she cocks her head.

“Do you have confessionals? I admit, I never really bothered learning anything about you people, it never seemed important.”

Her eyes look more purple than blue when they do this. Her impossibly fine, pale hair flies around her face and it makes her look more like her sister, just a little. She laughs again, nipping at an old bruise crowning the high, hollow point of Harrow’s ribcage, and Harrow  _ yanks _ Ianthe closer by the bones, pulling her golden scaphoid into a better shape to grind down on. Harrow forces the fingers inside her to curl.

“Bossy,” Ianthe breathes, “You always act like I’m going to leave. I’m not going anywhere, doll, I promise, you can slow down a little.”

Her other hand, warm and alive, slips up the length of Harrow’s body, soft, barely there and Harrow is full of bone and static, straining in every direction at the same time. Ianthe nuzzles into her ribs, tracing the shallow of Harrow’s breast with the edge of her thumb.

Harrow’s lip curls.

“Bitch,” she mutters, “Your sister should have strangled you in the womb. I would have rather slept with  _ her _ .”

“Oh,  _ Harry _ ,” Ianthe coos, rising up on one knee. She tucks her face into the side of Harrow’s neck. “If we’re going to be best friends like I just  _ know _ we are, then you should know you’re going to have to try a little harder if you want to hurt my  _ feelings, _ ” she hisses, teeth scraping against Harrow’s pulse, hand tightening suddenly, painfully around her breast.

“I would burn my House to ash and swallow it,” Harrow says, “before I think for a single microsecond about  _ your _ feelings—”

“Everybody  _ always _ wanted to fuck my sister. They fucked me instead when she said no. Honestly, you’re lucky she’s not here, I don’t think you could’ve kept up. Corona would’ve eaten you alive.”

Her tone is perfectly, evenly conversational, even while she slips a third column of gilded phalanges in alongside the first two, even though she’s flushed and panting and her cunt is wet when it slides almost by accident, almost like an afterthought, against one of Harrow’s thighs, even though there is a febrile, burning light in her eyes, which don’t match her face even a little bit, even if they do look more purple than blue in this light. Harrow pulls her down, holds Ianthe Tridentarius like a grudge, face turned to the inside of the princess’s wrist, where the skin is translucent and shining with sweat. Ianthe’s fingers are smooth, and manicured, and utterly unmarked. Not even sword-calloused; Naberius Tern was right-handed. Harrow sucks two of them into her mouth, and Ianthe gasps, a tiny, punched-out quaver, almost inaudible.

Ianthe Tridentarius tastes like swallowed pride.

“Initiative,” Ianthe manages, breathy and unstable, “I like it.”

And Harrow would tell her—

Something, some ‘I don’t care what you like,’ some ‘I would burn forever in the most lightless, bleak corner of space, I would hold my own head under the River, I would unspool my own bones to candy floss, before I care what you like,” and Ianthe would laugh, like she always does, but Ianthe’s fingers are in her mouth, and Ianthe’s fingers are in her cunt, and—

“I’m so glad we’re friends, Harry,” Ianthe murmurs, drowsy in the aftermath. “Nobody does it quite like you.”

She’s tucked up along Harrow’s side, a louche, half-wound comma. Ianthe’s a cuddler; it’s one of her worse faults. Harrow elbows her in the ribs and rolls away.

“I’m not staying,” she drawls witheringly.

“You never do,” Ianthe pouts, “I’ll miss you terribly, doll. Same time next week?”

“Eat shit and die, Tridentarius. I hope you choke.”

(Same time next week.)


	2. I Put My Faith in your Capable Brains

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dulcinea/Camilla/Palamedes;  
> Tags/Warnings: blood, the enabling of other people's really shitty coping mechanisms, smart people being dumb and fraught about thier feelings, threesome-f/f/m, riding

“You don’t like me very much, do you?” murmurs the Duchess of Rhodes. 

She’s very beautiful; they made her that way, of course she is, blue eyes enormous and luminous with satisfaction and consumptive fever, eyelashes thick and dark and very faintly clumped with sweat. Her skin so pale you can see every one of her veins, and they are, naturally, exquisite, milky and delicate; like looking through a chrysalis about to burst open. The Duchess of Rhodes has a mouth like a genocide, blood-bright and gleaming. She skims her swollen, invalid’s knuckles down Palamedes’ jaw; in his sleep, he nuzzles drowsily into her palm.

“I don’t like you taking advantage,” Cam drawls cooly, pressing her lips into a tight line.

“He doesn’t seem to mind.”

“He has a very poor sense of self-preservation.”

The Duchess of Rhodes cannot laugh for very long, before she starts to cough, but the one bright, pealing giggle that escapes before she stifles it is beautiful. She tucks a hand against her breast, and this too, is beautiful, was calculated to be beautiful, an artful drape to frame the shallow curve of it, thumbnail just scraping the edge of her perfectly rosy nipple.

It’s hard to tell if she even knows she’s doing it on purpose.

Lady Dulcinea Septimus draws her beautiful hair over her beautiful shoulder, leaning back on one arm, and Cam thinks:

_ She must be burning thalergy every day to stop it falling out. _

“You  _ are _ lovely together, you know,” Dulcinea says softly, splaying her hand over Palamedes’ chest, “you and him. You take good care of him.”

Her expression shutters; she turns her head just a little, to present her exquisitely tragic profile.

“Yes,” Cam replies, “I do.”

“Is that why you agree to this?”

You can’t blame her, Cam supposes, it’s how adepts are. The questions, constantly. He’s like that, too.

But that doesn’t make it Dulcinea Spetimus’s  _ business _ . Cam pushes her into the pillows instead, slanting her mouth over the Duchess of Rhodes’ mouth, doesn’t pull away until the slighter woman’s gasping shades into hypoxic, and not just smug. The turbulence of motion rouses Palamedes, who pushes up onto his elbows, blinking myopically over his shoulder.

“I was comfortable,” he protests, and doesn’t resist at all when Dulcinea draws him down to her chest, tracing obscure figures against the back of his neck with her nails. He hums, mouthing softly at the side of her breast.

“You poor dear,” she croons, “let us make it better.”

Her eyes flash towards Cam, almost questioning. Almost.

Cam hesitates, almost, and nods.

Dulcinea’s hands shake, pushing his head down harder, and her voice shakes, too, when he drags the flat of his tongue over her nipple, and the hand not clawing at the back of his neck is flung out imperiously, beckoning. Cam takes it, and squeezes, and Dulcinea’s hand weighs absolutely nothing, more like a dream of a hand than the thing itself, but it’s  _ hot _ , fever-warm as Cam guides Dulcinea’s hand down between her frail thighs, pushing down on the spidery fingers with her own, and leaning over the other woman entirely to bite at Palamedes’ shoulder.

He moans raggedly, punched up through the gravel of the lowest register of his mild, dry voice, and flings an arm back, groping for her hand.

There’s never quite enough rhythm, never  _ quite _ enough space on the mattress for the length of his limbs, not with the necessity of Dulcinea’s laying propped against her mountainously heaped pillows, never quite  _ enough _ . Palamedes’ lips skim over her knuckles as he slips down Dulcinea’s hollow, bird-skull hip, and they’ve always worked well together. He’s good at this part, lapping decadently, fucking his tongue up into Dulcinea while Cam toys with her clit, and between the two of them, it takes almost no time at all. It can’t; if they dragged it out like he usually wants to with a cunt in his face, she’d pass out before he decided to be finished.

She can’t ride him. Not enough muscle left in her legs. 

It’s unlikely, Cam thinks, that there was  _ ever _ enough muscle in her legs.

The thought is grimly satisfying.

Cam settles herself on Palamedes’ hips, drops forward onto his chest to drag his chin back down from the neck-breaking angle he’s tipped it back at.

“Eyes front, Warden.”

He groans.

“We’ve discussed, many times, that you’re not allowed to call me that while my cock is out,  _ Camilla _ .” He traces the line of her hip bone, back and forth, with the pad of his thumb. “I know we have.”

“Just making sure you’re still with us,” she snickers, pushing herself back up.

It’s because Dulcinea can’t, really, because  _ she _ can’t do this,  _ she _ can only mouth at his temple while Cam rides him, even if it’s not quite her bag, never really was, but Palamedes knows that, because he always knows, is the other thing; he’s fighting to keep both eyes open, breathing like he’s dying, like the Duchess of Rhodes breathes, thready, trembling gasps, and his hips jerk, and even with all that, he still pushes himself up onto one elbow, offers up the heel of his hand for Cam to grind herself against.

He alway falls asleep, after. It’s half the reason he has sex at all, really, just to be able to sleep for once, settling Cam’s calves sideways across his waist. The sharpness of angle puts her head level with Dulcinea’s hip.

The Duchess of Rhodes cards her swollen, invalid’s fingers through Camilla’s hair, and Cam allows it. Doesn’t flinch away, because it seems important not to flinch away.

“Don’t let him run himself ragged. I know he does,” says the Duchess of Rhodes, “and I've never quite understood why.” She traces her genocidally red mouth with the edge of her nail, considering, and the Duchess of Rhodes says:

“He deserves somebody who does, I think.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hit ya bitch up on twitter @gin_n_chthonic, or tumblr @thefaustaesthetic


	3. Archival Best Practices: A Meta-Review

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Camilla Hect/Palamedes Sextus  
> Tags: restraint, edging, pegging, terrible archival techniques

It’s a specific appeal, for a specific taste; the thing about the Warden of the Sixth is that he’s long, long limbs, long lines, long lashes, all angles and edges. He’s curled his fingers over the edge of his desk, arms flung out to either side, cheek crushed against the wood, and the line of his back throwing up craggy, vertebral shadows, like some wild mountainous terrain. There’s a furrow carved out between his shoulder blades, blue-black, and shifting tectonically.

Specific.

Specific, and logistically, something of a problem; the desk is scaled to his height, not hers, tall enough that even he has to stretch up onto the balls of his feet to lean over it, and the angle, consequently, is never going to work.

Cam worries her lip between her thumbnail and pinkie, considering. 

The idea that dawns on her is, objectively, a terrible one. It’s possibly the stupidest idea she’s ever had since they started doing this. On the other hand, given the choice between _it_ , and starting over...

She nudges a weighty tome with the side of her foot, leather binding _shuff_ -ing softly across the floor.

“Was that a _book_?”

She doesn’t answer.

Palamedes dissolves into laughter, snickering helplessly into his shoulder.

“I can’t—Adept _fucking_ Divine, Camilla, you—a _book_ —think of the _binding_ —” he wheezes, pushing himself up onto one elbow, fanning himself.

Cam glares.

“I can leave,” she drawls, “I _will_ , if you don’t stop.”

“No, don’t—don’t,” his chest heaves, gulping down air helplessly, like the oxygen alone could burn the laugh out of his throat, “Don’t go. I’ll stop. I’ll be good, I promise. Don’t leave.”

Somewhere in the midst of his hysteria, he’s turned around entirely, tailbone and one palm braced against the desk, his other hand stretched out towards her, palm up, fingers flexing with a tremulous, uncertain ripple, like he’s afraid she might actually go.

“I’ll be _so_ good,” he repeats, curling his hand around her wrist. 

He tugs, and Cam lets him, lets him draw her arm up to his lips, lets him flick the tip of his tongue over the pulse there, lets him mouth softly at the joint, lets him smear a line of open-mouthed, graceless kisses down to the crook of her elbow, and then back up, lets him suck two of her fingers into his mouth, humming with a kind of dazed rapture. Lets him slink, one vertebrae at a time, back onto the wood, supine and taut, the points of his ribs thrown into relief, still laving his tongue softly over her fingers, chasing the drift of her hand. He’s laying it on a little thick, honestly, but she lets him, lets him flutter his eyelashes while carding his fingertips through the trail of hair running down from her navel, just _barely_ enough pressure not to be ticklish. He runs his thumb down the length of her strap and moans.

Cam rolls her eyes, pulling her fingers from his mouth with a soft _pop_.

“Enough.”

“I was being demonstrative,” he protests. There is less contrition in his expression than there is life in the void.

“I don’t want you to demonstrate,” Cam drawls, “I want you to behave”

“I will,” he murmurs, turning his face back into her palm.

Cam worries her lip between her thumbnail and pinkie, considering. The book idea was terrible. This one is better.

“Your field. The paralysis—hypothetically, could you do that to yourself?”

Slowly, he raises his head, eyebrows knit together.

“Hypothetically, yes. I’ve never tried, for obvious reasons, but it isn’t...outside the realm of possibility.” Palamedes tugs absently at his neck, now lost in thought, and continues, “It would require an extraordinary amount of control, but it’s theoretically sound, as far as the _idea_ goes.”

“Good.”

She plants a hand on his sternum, leaning in.

“Turn over. Hands on the desk,” Cam says, “And don’t move. Knock twice if you need me to stop.”

It’s a specific appeal, a creature of sudden movements and twitchy fingers gone so utterly, completely still, fossilized, laid out for perusal. Cam brings the flat of her palm down across the back of one thigh, right under the curve of his ass, and he gasps, a short exhale punched out through his nose, but he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t so much as twitch. Not even his eyelids, not even when a bead of pinkish sweat rolls down the ridge of his brow and vanishes into his eyelashes. Not his hands, dug so hard into the corners of his desk that they must be bloody, not even to protest the unlovely, messy death of the Sixth House’s late quarter budgetary review, crumpled under his chest. Not even even when Cam pushes in. Not even when she starts to fuck him in earnest, stepping back up onto her book; he _whines_ , a miserable, desperate keening high in his throat, but he doesn’t move, and he doesn’t knock.

She smoothes her thumb over his hipbone soothingly. 

“Little more,” she croons, rolling her hips, a slow, filthy grind that drags a wounded, ecstatic groan out of him. “Could you come like this?”

“Doubt it,” Palamedes grits out, “The—the field–“

“Interesting,” she hums, “I’ll remember that. Let it go, then.”

Palamedes _unravels_ , the snap of a wire drawn too tight, ribs heaving and back bowing up off the desk, keening and cursing, and then unspools, slumping bonelessly, both hands creeping up to curl over the base of his skull. She’s about to offer him water when Cam realizes the sound he's making is less breathless, and more—

“A _book_ ,” he giggles, almost deliriously, “You had to _stand on a book_ , I cannot believe—“


	4. This Mirror Isn't Big Enough for the Two of Us

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Naberius/Colum;  
> Tags/Warnings: blood, mastrubation, the inherent homo-eroticism of dueling, unhealthy coping mechanisms, size difference, Naberius Tern has elaborate fantasies, and a rich inner life; Colum Asht has big dick

The cavalier of the Eighth is bleeding through his immaculate white leathers, from his thigh and his shoulder and his jaw, a thready ribbon of blood winding down his neck. He might as well have left his shield in the stands, for all the good it’s done him; he barely seems to use it at all, taking cut after cut with a placid, unreadable expression. No technique at all. It’s almost insulting.

By points, Naberius Tern is a minute, maybe less, from the win; his footwork is perfect, his form pristine, rapier snaking out over the edge of the other man’s greatsword, straight and gleaming, and the cavalier of the Eighth is not there, and the gulf where he is not swaddles Naberius Tern’s blade in useless, empty air, and the cavalier of the Eighth is beside him, had pivoted just barely, and  _ God _ , he’s fast for a big man, for a man big enough to keep a greatsword up one-handed, and his face does not move at all as he  _ cracks _ his targe down into Naberius’s spine. The impact wrenches Tern’s head back by the hair, teeth clacking, with an agonizing buzz chewing at the back of his skull. 

Naberius Tern hits the dirt, gagging.

He scrabbles, prone in the dust, rolling onto one hip to get his blade back up, and he does, and still it’s too late, it’s not enough. Colum Asht wrenches Tern’s rapier from his hand with the sheer weight of his own blade, coming down like the end of everything.

Call. Match to the Eighth.

Colum Asht’s face is utterly without joy, without rancor, without anything but the blood on it. He thumbs at the bleeding almost absent-mindedly, eyes shut, huffing a tired little sigh. He plants his sword in the dirt. Holds out his hand.

He is, Naberius realizes, staggered, offering to  _ help him up _ , of all the—

And for a long moment, he just sits, nursing a humiliated, nauseous twist low in the pit of his stomach, just stares at Colum Asht’s broad, craggy palm, a ragged thing seamed and scarred and missing the ring finger past the second knuckle. He just doesn’t  _ move _ , Colum doesn’t move, doesn’t  _ say _ anything, he just stands there, he just  _ is _ , he’s pushed his sleeves up the elbow, and the hard, yellowed strecth of his forearms is  brutally erotic in a way which somehow seems to have nothing at all to do with Naberius. Asht  looks somehow like architecture, like something built up and then left out in the rain, weathered and solid. 

The twist in his belly is sliding into something else. Naberius is struck with the idiot, insane impulse to kiss the man’s palm, just to see if it’d make him crack. Finally, for lack of a better option, he lets Colum Asht haul him up to his feet. His skin is shockingly, feverishly warm. 

“Nearly had at me, at the end,” Colum rumbles, and his voice is dragged up from somewhere miles underground, low and soft and thick with gravel. “Stop showing off.”

“Humility in all things, is it?” Naberius scrapes his tattered dignity back together, paints on his best lazy, disaffected sneer. “Do I get the rest of the sermon, too?”

“The Forgiving House receives all penitents,” Colum shrugs, “But you don’t seem the type.”

_ God _ . Voice like that, built like the side of a  _ fucking  _ building, and the man’s a monk. What a waste. 

They’d never let him hear the end of it, if they found out. He can hear Ianthe’s  _ honestly, Babs _ already. So Naberius turns, and walks away.

* * *

Naberius can’t see the bruise, but he can feel it, a huge hand between his shoulder blades, pressing down. He probes the edges of it gingerly, wrist hooked over his shoulder, hissing through his teeth. Presses his fingertips into his spine, and even as numb as they are, scalded into unfeeling by the shower spray, he can tell the skin there is split, just a little, burst open like too-ripe fruit. He drags his hand back over his shoulder, leans his neck into his palm. The tile wall of the shower is cool against his forehead. God.

_ God _ , but the Eighth hits hard, the Eighth could probably crack him in half like an egg, could probably span the width of Naberius’s trim waist with his hand, could probably lift him up wherever, however he wanted to, could probably hold him there, or hold him down, could—

Would probably not do any of that.

Naberius laughs, a thready, mean little chuckle forced out around a gasp. His other hand slips down his thigh. God, they’d never let him hear the end of it. He cups himself lightly, thumb brushing back and forth, and tries to conjure up the Eighth’s— _ Colum _ , he rolls the sound of it around in his mouth—tries to conjure up  _ Colum’s _ face. The shape of his jaw, bleeding. The eyes, vaguely brown, but somehow translucent, like something underwater, or under glass.

Colum would probably just hold him, cage him in against the bulk of his chest, something you could crawl inside of and be away from everything, and it would be heavy, and hot, and he would probably wrap his arm around Naberius’s chest, and drop his head into the crook of his shoulder and just breathe there. He would probably just pant into Naberius’s neck, and mouth softly at his pulse, with the oddly delicate solemnity he does everything with, and probably would have to be coaxed into biting. He would—Naberius stifles a whine into his bicep, squeezing his cock, thumb teasing at the head—he would have bigger hands.  _ Does _ have bigger hands. They were all callouses, rough and hard. They would catch, they would scrape him up, maybe, maybe a little.

God.

He entertains, briefly, that idea that Colum, monkish and blushing, would not know how to do anything, and would need to be shown how to do everything, and could be taught, trained—

His cock flags a litte. Too much work.

No, no he would just—he’d be  _ big _ , he would roll his big shoulders and dig in with his big, hot hands, and rumble something idiotic and sentimental, rasp soemthing like “Easy, easy now,” and would open him up like that, voice twelve miles under them, and arms steady, shoving all of Naberius’s weight up onto the balls of his feet, and he would only barely be able to push back into Colum’s fingers, but it would be—and he would trace the veins up the length of Naberius’s cock while he did, tease at the slit, and—and he would be  _ big _ , would be a merciless, unrelenting stretch pushing in, and  _ God _ , it’s been too fucking long since anybody fucked him, the leash he’s kept on, the choke-chain of nobody willing to cross the Twins, but  _ he _ would be, Colum wouldn’t care about the politics of Ida, would be holy and above it all, and above Naberius, and he would be  _ big _ , would bottom out with an impossibly low, wounded groan, and Colum’s hands, probably, would leave his hips purple. 

He strokes himself faster, bucking into his fist.

Probably a lost cause.

His back aches again, in the aftermath, skin raw everywhere, and his cock softening on his thigh.

“Don’t seem the type,” he mutters, water sluicing down the slope of his nose, face tipped up. “Fuck does he think he is.”

Naberius slicks his hair down his neck, tonguing at his aching teeth.  _ God _ , the man hits hard.

What a fucking waste.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hit ya bitch up on tumblr @thefaustaesthetic, or twitter @gin_n_chthonic


	5. My Inner Life is a Sheet of Black Glass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cam/Cor Cyberpunk AU!  
> Feat. frottage and vaginal fingering.   
> Additional explanatory notes at the end of this one about the broader universe, for interested parties

######  _ I varied my velocities, watched myselves sleep. Something's not right about what I'm doing but I'm still doing it-- living in the worst parts, ruining myself. My inner life is a sheet of black glass. If I fell through the floor I would keep falling. _

######  _ -Richard Siken, War of the Foxes _

She thinks she’s smart--and maybe she is; smart enough to have found Cam, anyway, but not smart enough to know when she’s beat. Rich kids. They’re all the same; you just bark a little, drop into gravel and crassness, and they just lap it up, fold like a cheap table. So Cam drags up her best Cohort snap, low and rough, and says:

“Get the  _ fuck _ on the floor, Ida,”

Coronabeth Tridentarius chuckles throatily, still rocking herself lazily against Cam’s thigh. She’s wet already; Cam can feel it through the cheap synthweave of her trousers. 

Corona chuckles throatily, and grinds down against Cam’s knee, and drops her golden head into Cam’s neck, because Corona likes to play at being a brat, and she still thinks she can hold out. And she’s wrong about that, they’re always wrong about that, the rich ones. There’s a whole seminar on it they give you in the Alexandrites, and Cam was the one teaching the damn thing, after just two tours. Cam tangles her fingers in the shining mass of curls at the base of Corona’s skull, right above the immaculate gold plating of her Node implant, and  _ yanks _ , pulling Corona up off her neck to look her in the eye.

“On the floor, Ida.”

Tridentarius whines, strangled and lovely, and drops.

There are rules.

You don’t Log On alone. You don’t go in without somebody there to pull you out.

You don’t leave anyone behind.

Coronabeth Tridentarius stretches her arm out across the cool floor with an easy, leonine grace, cheek pillowed on her shoulder, and she lays there, like a landmine waiting to go off. There are more Nodes gleaming at her wrists, the insides of her elbows. All are gold. This is because she’s not as smart as she thinks she is, and hasn’t realized yet that all the flash is  _ too _ good a conductor, which is why the insides of her wrists and elbows are also dotted with tiny constellations of circuit burns.

In a better, kinder world, where they aren’t the people they are, Cam would kiss them, follow the track of them up her arms to her shoulders, follow her shoulders to the slick hollow of her collarbones, shiny with sweat, and they would sleep in the next morning, and get breakfast, and sit in parks, and neither of them would be full of screaming ghosts. But they  _ are _ the people they are.

So instead, Cam settles a knee on either side of Corona’s hips, and reaches in to the part of herself that still wonders if Corona ever tried to have the Nodes replaced, if it ever made a difference, the way all of Cam’s tinkering with her own mods failed to ever make a difference, if  _ she _ ever hears things, ever finds queries she never made in her search history. And Cam turns that part off. She was always good at that part, reaching in and turning things off.

Just not good enough.

Beneath her, Corona whines again, hips stuttering, and reaches up to drag Cam’s hand over her breast. 

In a better, kinder world, maybe Cam allows it, maybe traps Corona’s nipple between her fingers, and thumbs delicately edge of where she can still reach, because Corona is disastrously sensitive as far as her tits are concerned. In a better world, they aren’t doing this on a warehouse floor, the last eight square feet of offline groundspace in the City.

Cam purses her lips, staring down the flesh overspilling her palm. Corona looks back at her, heavy-lidded and hot.

Sometimes Corona’s eyes don’t match her face.

She drags the edge of Corona’s shirt up over her tits, and drops her head low, huffing hot air across her nipples, just to watch Corona squirm and buck, before scraping her teeth over one of them. Ida’s easy, like that, they’re all biters, you just have to bite back and they melt. Second lecture of the seminar. They had to fill out a worksheet on dental anatomy and nerve correspondences. 

Then she peels her hand away, and drags Corona’s wrists up over her head, pressing them into the floor until she can feel the other girl’s implants grinding against her fine, lovely carpals, and sucks a splotchy purple bloom into the side of her neck. Then another. Then another, and another, until she’s panting and cursing, littered with enough hickeys to exactly match the burns crawling up her arms. Cam drags her tongue over her nipple, and lets herself rock down, just once, into the clawing, trapped heat between Corona’ thighs, just once, just to ease the throb between her own.

On some stupid, sentimental impulse, she settles back on her heels, and reaches back, gently cupping her hand between Corona’s thighs. Rubs tiny circles into the crease of her hip with her thumb, presses the heel of her palm into Corona’s clit with a gentle, easy pressure.

“Oh, you’re  _ sweet _ ,” Corona croons, eyes fluttering shut, “I didn’t realize you were here to be  _ nice _ .”

“I can stop,” Cam drawls coolly, pulling her hand away.

She can practically feel the desperate twitch ripple through Corona’s cunt when she does, and Corona hisses through her teeth, tossing her hair.

“Don’t you dare.”

It’s all too tight and too awkward, hands pressing between layers of clothes because nobody’s bothered to undress, really, and they’re not going to, even if Corona is  _ soaked _ , so wet Cam can feel--imagines she feels a spark jumping around her wrist Node, like there’s some conductivity, somewhere, and it’s an absurd thought, and she wants to laugh, but it reminds her of--

So she doesn’t, and just dips her fingertips into the slick, soft heat, and works Corona’s clit until she all but screams, hawk-high and feral, head thrown back.

Cam catches the tiny, fluttering aftershocks on her fingertips as she pulls out.

Corona blinks drowsily up at her, and her eyes don’t match her face.

“Back to work, then?” she hums.

Cam wrist Node  _ beeps _ , indicator lit up blue. She drags herself up off the floor, and taps open the notification. 

The warehouse is entirely offline. It’s why they picked it--both of them. She shouldn’t be getting anything, shouldn’t be able to.

It happens every time anyway.

_ Where are you? _

She closes the message.

Across the room, Corona is cradling her own wrist as she plugs in, her beautiful mouth set in a hard line. Cam catches her eye and nods.

They don’t ask each other who they left in There. Who the ghosts are in their respective machines.

“Alright, Ida,” she says, “You’ll be going In tethered, 4C up. We’re low on battery, so no callback unless it is  _ absolutely _ necessary.”

“Sir, yes sir,” Cam drawls, rolling her eyes. “You know, I used to have the most  _ deliciously _ prurient drama about you--Alexandrites, I mean, the ones who--

“Nireids,” Cam corrects, “Alexandrites don’t license out.”

She pauses.

“Ida. Don’t die in there.”

Coronabeth nods.

You don’t Log On alone. 

You don’t go In without somebody there to pull you out.

You don’t leave anyone behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The idea behind this one was like,  
> The River is the Internet, you can plug into ye olde cyberpunk VR ‘Net, but you need somebody there on the other side to pull you back out of the net, and that at some unspecified point in the past, Palamedes went in after Dulcinea, and something went wrong, and Cam couldn’t get him out in time.  
> And that, similarly, corona had lost Ianthe somehow.  
> But some version of them, whether or not it’s actually the real thing, some version of them is there  
> Like.  
> Phantom texts, or phantom notifications on your cyber punk phone, from a person who is ostensibly dead, and that these persist, even when the technological limitations would ordinarily make them impossible.  
> So Corona and Cam have kind of teamed up to try to go find their respective ghosts, just to settle it once and for all.


	6. Scream Queens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cam/Pal but also Cam/Corona/Gideon, in a nebulous modern AU where everyone is low-key, high-key a dirtbag  
> tags/warnings: temperature play, rough sex, hair-pulling, grinding

It’s October, but it isn’t, summer having decided to go out screaming, an anguished yellow howl of triple-digit temperatures and rotting gourds liquidizing in front the grocery store, of huffing the arterial humidity through a wet rag of cinnamon and clove. 

It’s her and Palamedes, and they’re dating, but they’re not, but they’re not _not_ -dating, and they’re sitting in a bathtub filled with a desultory bare inch of melting bodega ice, _paleta_ wrappers and popsicle sticks lying crumpled on the side of the tub like an omen. _La Michoacana_ , reversed. Cam lifts her hair, limp with sweat, away from the back of her neck; Palamedes, obligingly, traces a lump of ice around the knob of her cervical vertebrae. She exhales, a little raggedly, a little unsteady, as the meltwater trickles down her spine.

Palamedes settles her against his chest, and the tips of his fingers are faintly purple, smoothing up and down her arms; his cock stirs with vague interest against her back, but he doesn’t move except to mouth at the hinge of her jaw, lips still sticky with coconut _paleta_.

He drops his cheek onto her hair, frigid palm rattling a handful of ice up and down her shoulder. 

“Okay,” he murmurs thoughtfully, “hypothetically, if you turned your superlative talents towards eating Corona right, could you convince her to let me hang out in their living room, where the air-conditioning is?”

Cam snorts, and drops her head back onto his shoulder. Obligingly, he traces a lump of ice down the line of her throat. 

“Tern,” she drawls back.

Palamedes makes a disgusted noise, thumb stroking idly back and forth over her pulse.

“Too much work. And much less chance of success, because Tern’s an ass.”

Cam rolls her ankle against the tub, and decides not to.

“Whereas you and Coronabeth are actually dating,” Palamedes continues, “and you enjoy her company, and could you please,” he plants a chilly kiss to the inside of her wrist, holding her hand up to his neck, “please go have sex with your girlfriend so that we can avail ourselves of their very nice, very air-conditioned house.”

“Dulcinea.”

“At Pro and Mia’s for the week, and you know she keeps her thermostat up.”

He’s not wrong—her houseplants, and her joints have Dulcinea Septimus’s thermostat set at ‘equatorially balmy’ year-round, and Naberius exists in Palamedes’ life mostly as a semi-regular hookup, from whom he occasionally steals. Corona’s their best bet. Cam tugs their joined hands down to her chest.

“You’d owe me.”

Palamedes slides his other hand down from her throat, a lazy, indulgent slide, and teases at her nipple, stiff from the cold.

“I’m very free with favours.”

He scrapes his teeth against her shoulder. Something horrible and fond uncurls in the pit of her stomach, a low, lazy heat.

“You’d have to make it up to me.” Cam murmurs, arcing up into the touch.

“Naturally.”

It’s not the _most_ graceful she’s ever managed, but Cam manages to twist enough to plant a hand on his shoulder, and the angle is all wrong, but she shoves at his shoulder, and, obligingly, he lets himself be pushed up against the wall of the tub despite the lack of force. Between the indolent sprawl of his knees, his cock is—well, shrunken from the ice bath, but stirring, and his pupils are huge and dark as Cam straddles his hips. 

“Now,” she says.

[x]

“Babs isn’t here,” Corona says, “He left with Ianthe an hour ago.”

“Well. Don’t tell him I’m here, and I’ll owe you one.” Palamades replies lightly, tipping his face up in ecstatic relief as they step in from the pumpkin-spiced heatstroke outside. He vanishes into the next room.

“Ooooh, fun,” Corona hums at his retreating form, “I love a blank check.”

Coronabeth Tridentarius, Cam thinks, may be the only living thing not wilted in a five hundred mile radius. Her hair is a radiant cloud around her face, tank top knotted high over the soft slope of her stomach, tongue working thoughtfully behind her glossy pink lips, the colour of bubblegum ice cream, or—and it’s the blood in them, the little curl of cruelty that jumps out of her when you least expect it—or the colour of a dissection, of something’s insides, wet and flushed.

She smiles hungrily, draping herself over Cam’s shoulders. She is not, Cam notes, wearing a bra. 

“I was so glad you texted when you did,” she murmurs, wrapping her arms around Cam’s waist. Cam leans back, stroking the fine, golden hairs of her forearm. Corona’s skin is expensively, impossibly soft.

“I have a surprise for you.”

[x]

Harrow looks like a dead pixel, a pitch-dark glitch tucked into the corner of the Tridentarius’s white-leather sofa.

“Nonagesimus. Gideon’s upstairs, I take it?” Palamedes yawns, sliding into the opposite corner of the couch. “One of my better ideas this week. Should’ve known you’d think of the same thing.” 

Harrow glances up from her phone, fixing him with a withering stare.

“It took you this long? You’re slipping, Sextus.”

Palamedes snorts softly.

“I’m a hack.” He murmurs agreeably, and then:

“You’re not joining them?”

Harrow’s expression shutters like a condemned building.

“No.”

Palamedes shrugs one-shouldered, with a vague _none-of-my-business_ gesture. He rolls his ankle against the floor, and cocks his head to the side, and decides not to.

Instead, he says:

“Can I get you a drink?”

[x]

‘Surprise’ really doesn’t cover it, the way the corner of Corona’s sheets doesn’t _really_ cover the thatch of damp ginger curls between Gideon’s thighs.

Cam raises her eyebrows.

Corona beams.

Gideon lifts her head with a drowsy, lopsided, fucked-out grin, and says:

“Oh, Hey Cam!”

[x]

“It is a shockingly pretentious drink,” Palamedes explains, swirling his glass, “It’s got lychee in. I added them because Naberius hates them, because he has terrible taste.”

Harrow shoots him another _look_ , a blackness of gaze and a disdainful wrinkle of brow suggestive of a whole language unto itself. Palamedes, fluent in eyebrows, nods.

“Exactly. He has terrible taste; he wouldn’t deign to fuck _me_ if he didn’t—look at me, for God’s sake. Cheers.”

Harrow rolls her eyes, and resumes flicking through a menu with the TV remote, thoroughly and comprehensively muddling the _Shudder_ recommendations algorithm of the Third House.

She sips delicately at her drink, expecting to hate it, only to find that Palamedes has already watered it down for her.

[x]

So sure, so somewhere, in the back of her head, Cam knows that this is the price of admission, that she and Corona are “dating” to the tune of using each other to ignore their respective problems, that Corona finds the concept of a window AC unit charmingly quaint, like she finds the concept of apartments charmingly quaint, or the fact that Cam doesn’t shave charmingly quaint, “rustic”, and that everybody in the room is using each other for something, except maybe Gideon, who is so puppyishly eager to please it twinges across her heartstrings like sad country, a doleful twang of genuine heartbreak if Cam stops to think about it too long. So Cam doesn’t think about it. So Cam just wants, lets the want wash over her like the kiss of the exquisite HVAC, prickling over her skin.

Beside her, Corona hums luxuriantly, arms flung up over her head as Gideon swipes her fingers along the silky edges of her cunt. Cam catches Gideon by the wrist, and tugs her hand away.

“No,” she says, “She has to work for this one.”

Corona sighs, mock-outraged, archly amused.

“That’s not very nice,” she pouts.

Cam lofts an eyebrow at her, leans down to nuzzle at her jaw. 

“She was nice to you already.”

“You’re a terrible girlfriend,” Corona pants into her mouth. Her eyes are lidded and heavy, the colour of bruised fruit.

“The worst,” Cam agrees. Her fingers are still tight around Gideon’s wrist. Cam tugs the other girl’s hand up, sucks two of her broad, warm fingers into her mouth, and Gideon tastes like Coronabeth. Like salt, and her own skin. 

“Not that I’m not down,” Gideon groans, a little unsteadily, “but just so I know: am I being used as your sexy pawn in an obscure power struggle?”

Cam pulls away with a soft, wet, _pop_. Corona lets her radiant head flop back against the mattress.

“Yes,” says Cam.

“MmmmHmmm,” coos Coronabeth.

“Oh,” Gideon shudders, voice breaking as Cam thumbs at her nipples, “that’s fine, then.”

[x]

“My God!” gasps Jeffery Combs, his face perfectly, digitally re-mastered, crisp-lined on a TV that could buy both Harrow and Palamedes’ respective buildings, eyes wide behind his glasses, “They’re using tools!”

Palamedes peels his own from his face, working the arms back and forth. He cocks his head again, listening intently.

“I don’t think they are,” he muses, “they’d be louder if they were.”

“Disgusting,” Harrow opines, aiming a sharp kick at his knee.

The joint crumples like paper, and if there’s any sound from upstairs, it is swallowed by the heat, and Palamedes’ snicker, and the dulcet, soothing tones of _Bride of Re-animator (1990)_.

[x]

There’s something about the light—like it’s liquid, heavy, dripping off the rosy points of Corona’s nipples, catching in the runnels of old stretch-marks, like fat splashes of it keep slipping down the soft swell of her belly, tits bouncing as she grinds down against Gideon’s thigh, hips jerking in shallow, greedy rolls.

She whimpers, gnawing at her lip, as Cam urges Gideon’s leg up higher, muscle flexed tighter, slick with sweat and slick with Corona.

“Almost,” Cam murmurs into Corona’s neck, arms wrapped her around her waist, teasing her clit in tiny circles, too light and too teasing to be any kind of satisfying, and then:

“Gideon. Pick your head up.”

Gideon does, her eyes all blown out like the light is. Cam pushes Corona down onto her knees and elbows, so Gideon can mouth at her tits, all broad tongue and good-girl whimpering while Corona pushes herself back against the muscle of Gideon’s leg and claws at the other girl’s shoulders. Cam keeps one hand on the small of her back, pushing down, and the other tucked between her own thighs, pressing the heel of her palm into her clit.

“I won’t tell, if you won’t,” Corona stutters into Gideon’s neck, a whisper pitched _just_ high enough to hear. 

Typical.

Cam takes a fistful of Corona’s hair—damp with sweat, heavy like it’s something alive, hot and soft in her hand—and wrenches her back upright, away from Gideon and back into her own chest.

“Nice try.”

“Wasn’t it?” Corona giggles breathlessly, twisting to smear a glancing, sticky kiss along the edge of Cam’s jaw.

It’s something about how the room is too hot, even with the AC, how in every place they touch, they are all glued together, how Gideon skips leg day and cooldowns, and so squawks indignantly when Cam pushes her thighs as far apart as they’ll go, then whines expletives at the luminous ceiling as Cam pushes Corona back down, tonguing at Gideon’s cunt while Cam holds her down by the hair, it’s something about how everything is so _much_ , so soft and so wet and so close, like everything is melting together, like it could be her clit under Corona’s mouth, her own legs trembling—

Which they aren’t, because unlike Gideon, Cam has never skipped leg day in her life. 

She pushes three fingers into Coronabeth without preamble, and takes Gideon’s hand—

[x]

“Am I running some kind of hostel?” 

Coronabeth narrows her eyes at Harrow and Palamedes, hands propped her hips. The two of them sit perched on her couch like a pair of underfed starlings, black and brown and hunched at odd angles to each other.

“Where did you expect us to go?” Palamedes drawls, and then:

“Can I get you a drink?”

Harrow says only “yes,” staring flatly like it should be obvious.

“Can you get me,” Corona repeats, “a drink.”

“Yes.”

“This isn’t your _house_ , Sextu—what even _is_ that!?”

Gideon, meanwhile, drapes herself over Harrow, heat notwithstanding, and Cam deposits herself somewhere in-between.

“Sangria,” he explains, “I made it last time I was here. Took Babs’ card while he was asleep, bought ingredients, made a pitcher. I offered him some, and he said ‘is there lychee in this? I hate lychee’, and I told him I was sorry, and that I didn’t know, and then I sucked him off to prove that I _was_ sorry. But I did know, I just didn’t want him drinking it all before I came by again. And then I put it in the fridge you don’t use, so you wouldn’t either.”

Palamedes rattles his glass invitingly.

“Lychee,” he repeats, “and ginger, and citrus, and Pinot Grigio. _Shockingly_ pretentious, but he’d’ve cottoned on if it was simpler.”

Corona blinks.

“That is so. _So_ elaborately bitchy.”

There is a faint, grudging admiration creeping into her voice like a sickness.

Palamedes pushes his glasses up his nose.

“We’re not so different, you and I,” he announces, and Corona snorts.

“ _Ugh_. I hate that your boyfriend is funny sometimes,” she sniffs to Cam, and Palamedes says:

“I’m not—” at the same that Cam says:

“He isn’t—”

“Sure,” Corona soothes, “just like there’s nothing going over there, either”. She waves her hand vaguely at Gideon and Harrow. “ _Ugh._ Lychee?”

“And ginger.”

She stalks into the next room.

**Author's Note:**

> hit ya bitch up on twitter @gin_n_chthonic, or tumblr @thefaustaesthetic


End file.
